These things may look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we're not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you, we simply don't have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

I think this might be my 2017 yearlust: old means to new ends in the old days, technologically speaking: Ken Macleod's "... the crystal radio that receives and the spark gap that transmits";, African talking drum networks, Vikings using cliff-face acoustics for public speaking, the Antikythera mechanism and so on and so on and so on.

One can easily imagine a scifi genre that transcends mere Steampunk and uses ALL the technological improvisations of history in a single milieu to craft something not entirely unlike the modern world.

August 23rd, 2017

Been a while. Good to see us still clinging grimly to what used to be the best place on the internet. I got love for LJ; so many great conversations, so many friends I made without meeting. Good times.

So. I joined Steemit a few weeks ago. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Steemit is a hybridized blogging/social media site that literally pays you in Likes.

Well, Upvotes. Same thing.

How is this possible? To answer that, I'd have to explain Steem cryptocurrency which would in turn require me to explain cryptocurrency in general which would lead to explanations of bitcoin and the blockchain technology. The latter is easy; it's basically just servers but decentralized. Random people all over the world keep a big copy of all transactions on their system and a vast majority of them have to tally or transactions won't go through. Prevents cheating and scamming and hacking. Also, cheaper.

Oh yeah, that's this year's yearlust by the way. Money. I realized about two years ago that being poor is only fun in your twenties (because *everything* is fun in your twenties) and there is nothing noble or clever or closer-to-earth about being a broke-ass nigga. Yes, I am black and I am using my privilege. The privilege of being able to call myself a quasi-reclaimed racial slur. Woohoo. Deal with it.

Steem is a crypto that is earned on the Steemit aite by posting quality content that people like. They upvote your poat or comment and 7 days later, the payout is available for withdrawal. It is completely free to use, extremely clever in design and has enough enthusiastic techies in the membership that it has become self-correcting to block and counter griefers and scammers and people who try to game the system.

Turns out once money is involved, people get active. Who knew?

My favorite description of it (coincidentally my own) is that Steemit is the single moat elegant way of converting literacy into lucre that currently exists.

So. I will be crossposting between there and here quite a bit since my content is similar on both platforms anyway. Comics, movies, writing, cryptocurrency, other such thinkwank.

Thanks for reading. Let's get this money.

PSOh, I'm steemit.com/@edumurphy if you want to take a look.

PPSFor game balance purposes, Steemit doesn't let you use more than five tags per post.

- INjection 11 and 12- Brigid is far too paranoid and brilliant and rich to trust an actual lawyer so she grabbed pretty much very law-library ever digitized, probably paid a bunch of students with scanners and shit to sneak into libraries to get at the shit that *isn't* and loaded all into LawBot- then again, maybe LawBot has only been programmed to give a shit about contracts- that moment when we see through her eyes (and Sheela's) in the mirror is powerful (yet funny: dick pics lol)- Sheela is not quite her AI, I don't think, more like her Manfred MacXian exocortex but the difference is getting awfully thin- why do I have a terrible feeling that the Injection helped her build that teleporter before it went ... off the reservation, shall we say- or maybe she took some of Robin's knowledge and did systems engineering/hacking/SCIENCE!!! to it until it spat out a functioning teleport device

March 12th, 2017

So I gotta ask, why is it that in fiction whenever some person or entity claims to be Beyond Good and Evil, it's invariably because they're doing some evil shit? How come we never see some amoral individual saving orphans, saving lives or saving the world because good evil don't make no difference to them?

November 6th, 2016

"It means there's normal people, like your mom. There's people like me who train, study, barter and bargain their way into certain skills and powers. And then there are liminal people. You and yours are born with some of the weirdest collections of gifts and curses ever assembled on this planet." - Entropy of Bones, Ayize Jama-Everett

'"... Every white nation, even Belgium, found its slaves on the continent of Africa. From then on, African kings learned that they must surrender their sovereignty or accept deportation. The title "King" was changed to "Chief," so that even now if an African ruler calls himself "King," it sounds ridiculous to the uninformed white observer." - Nwafor Orizu, Without Bitterness (1944)

The monstrous games that have been played with the African psyche using language alone. Puts me in mind of that anecodote about two young fish who meet an older fish as they swim along. Older fish says to them, all jovial and avuncular, "Boy, this is some nice water, innit?" as he swims by.The two younger fish look at each other and one of them asks: "What the fuck is *water*?"

Ales Kot’s Zero: Ales Kot is apparently the guy responsible for that bizarre-yet nifty MODOK-falls-in-love-with-Maria-Hill run on Secret Avengers. Zero is a comic book that is familiar and yet, in some ways, like nothing I have ever seen. It starts out as Bourne-Identity-sans-amnesia-meets-Kurt-Russel’s-Soldier then turns into Global-Frequency-#10-meets-Matt-Fraction’s-Casanova. Gets weirder and weirder from there.

If Luther Strode was Charles Atlas Superpowers: The Comic, then Zero is Bleak Male Energy: The Comic. Warren Ellis attributed the term to Allen Ginsberg (who by the way is Sir Appearing In This Book). "Bleak male energy" is in essence that capacity for the vicious doing and reception of damage, that violent bite-gouge-fuck-kill urge that all men secretly have, represented in Zero as a black spider-Cthulhu ... thing that apparently crawls into male hearts while in the womb and grows with them and makes them do … well, all the horrible shit that men have to done to women, children, each other and the world over the past 100000 years. Zero eventually turns into a meditation on violence and cruelty as perpetuated by humans in general (but men in particular) and the cycles of revenge and war that it begets, sometimes calculated, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes en masse but always always present.

--

Curious apparent plot-hole: the very first violence we see done in issue #1 is a fight to the death between a bio-enhancile Palestinian and an equally enhanced Israeli. They have literally been leaping tall buildings and punching each other through walls for three hours before our hero shows up (his mission is to assassinate the Palestinian and extract the enhancile device from his chest) While the mission is successful (thanks to a well-timed Israeli tank shell), he has a very understandable PTSD moment and shoots the Israeli enhancile in the head.

Fast-forward to issue #13 or so when the brother of aforementioned Isreali shows up at Company HQ and gets into a brutal fight with our hero Edward Zero. Zero is, while a monumental badass, still pure human and totally unenhanced. How come the fight was completely even and Zero ends up choking the guy out Bourne Ultimatum style with blood and wounds all over both of them. How does that work?

Unless of course the psychedelic fungus mushroom ayahuasca multiverse nonsense that comes later retroactively invalidated the rules of reality, an enhancile that can fight non-stop for three hours and withstand being punched through walls should be able to pink-mist an ordinary operative in a straight-up fistfight, no matter how highly trained the latter is. It would be like a bloodlusted movie!Captain America having a hand-to-hand fight with Jason Bourne in a tightly enclosed space – and losing.